Mailchimp Pricing Plans: How much does it cost?

At first glance, the Atlanta-based company is pretty generous, offering free newsletters. However, make sure you read until the end as there are a few snags in their pricing model.

MailChimp pricing in a nutshell

MailChimp offers the Forever Free plan for up to 2,000 contacts and 12,000 emails per month (with ads). The Growing Business plan starts at $10 per month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails. The Pro Marketer plan adds MailChimp’s advanced email marketing features to your current plan for an extra $199 per month.

MailChimp also features a pay as you go pricing system where you’ll just pay for the amount of emails that you send. This plan comes with the same features as the monthly MailChimp plans. But if you need to add the advanced MailChimp Pro features, this will cost you an additional $199 a month. Let’s have a look at some of their prices:

MailChimp Pay as you go plans

Similarly to a cell phone setup you prepay your email quota. These credits never expire.

Emails

Price per email

Price

5,000

$0.02

$150

10,000

$0.02

$200

50,000

$0.01

$500

75,000

$0.01

$750

MailChimp monthly plans and prices

The advantage of a subscription is that you never run out of credits thus your automations won’t stop on Black Friday because you forgot to refill.

Mailchimp Plans

Forever Free

Growing Business

Pro Marketer

Features

Marketing Automation

(Autoresponders)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Abandoned Cart

Yes

Yes

Yes

A/B Testing

Yes

Yes

Yes

Reports

Yes

Yes

Yes

Inbox Preview

No

25 free

1,000 free

Segmentation

Yes

Yes

Yes

Chat and Email Support

No (Knowledge base only)

Yes

Yes

Mailchimp advertisement

Yes (a small banner in the newsletter’s footer)

No

No

Advanced features

Time Zone delivery

No

Yes

Yes

Predicted Demographics

No

Yes

Yes

Geo-segmentation

No

Yes

Yes

Transactional Emails

Yes

Yes

Yes

Advanced segmentation

No

No

Yes

Comparative Reports

No

No

Yes

Multivariate Testing

No

No

Yes

Mailchimp cost

500 users

Free*

$10

$10 + $199

1,000 users

Free*

$25

$25 + $199

2,000 users

Free*

$30

$30 + $199

5,000 users

X

$50

$50 + $199

10,000 users

X

$75

$75 + $199

25,000 users

X

$150

$150 + $199

50,000 users

X

$250

$250 + $199

* You can only send 12,000 emails per month.

But what MailChimp Plan should you choose?

Firstly you need to decide if you need a pay as you go account where you purchase email credits and send campaigns out or if it makes more sense to have a monthly account with a subscriber limitation. Generally speaking, if you send email campaigns regularly, getting a monthly account is more sensible. However, if you just want to send the odd campaign every now and then (or are generally scared of commitment), buying email credits is your best option.

Monthly plans: Mailchimp Prices

New Business – Forever Free Plan: MailChimp lets you start your email marketing program for free. Actually this complementary plan is very generous and includes plenty of features. For example, you have access to all the templates and design options. Unlike other providers, the email automations and (some) other advanced features (e.g. A/B test, reporting or the ecommerce abandoned cart feature) are included in this tier too. However, you won’t be able benefit from any personal support.

You have to be aware that this plan is limited to 2,000 subscribers (contacts) and 12,000 emails (a month). If you exceed these, you’ll have to purchase a monthly plan or email credits (pay as you go). Take into account that when sending campaigns, a MailChimp self-promoting badge will show in your communications.

We’re big fans of MailChimp’s free plan, but, honestly speaking we like MailerLite’s free plan even more. Theirs is completely ad-free, allows up to 1,000 subscribers with no cap on the amount of emails you can send.

Growing Business Plan: Chances are that the MailChimp Free plan isn’t for you, for example, if you need to send more than 12,000 emails per month or you have more than 2,000 contacts. The monthly paid plans come with other advantages, the most relevant are:

The MailChimp branding will disappear from your emails.

Preview how your emails will look in different inboxes (e.g. Outlook or Gmail). You’ll get 25 previews a month.

Get MailChimp’s Delivery by Time Zone and make sure subscribers receive the campaigns when’s a good time for them, even if they live in different countries.

Get chat and email support.

Pro Marketer Plan: This isn’t cheap at all as you’ll need to pay an extra $199 a month to get MailChimp’s cutting edge features. But let’s see what these Pro features can do for you and your organization:

MailChimp saves the Advanced Segmentation options for the Pro users. Basically, these will let you create complex segmentations based on user behaviour (e.g email activity, demographics and purchase history).

You will be able to create Comparative Reports which allow you to group campaigns reports and do a bunch of geeky statistic research.

Multivariate Testing is possible. With the free and monthly plans you can A/B test one variant (e.g. subject line or body message). But if you want to test the subject line and the body message at the same time, you’ll need the Multivariate Testing.

Conclusion

The free plan is actually quite generous and will be enough for most small businesses and organizations. If you don’t mind not having dedicated support and the advertisement at the footer of your email, of course.

MailChimp’s Pro plan is really expensive (an extra $199 a month) and unless you are looking to create complex segmentations, need an advanced reporting system or you want to do multivariate testing it’s not worth it.

MailChimp is one of the most expensive newsletters tools out there. If you are looking for a budget-friendly solution we’d encourage you to try our Newsletter Pricing Comparison Tool and find one that suits you.

FAQ

Do I need MailChimp's Pro features?

These features can do really advanced tasks, however they are quite expensive as they’ll cost you $199 extra a month. Unless you need to perform complex A/B tests, require (really) advanced segmentation or would like to get comparative reports, you don’t need the Pro features.